Education Endowment Foundation:EEF blog: Three themes for professional development – mechanisms for change

EEF blog: Three themes for professional development – mechanisms for change

Susie Fraser introduces three themes for professional development
Author
EEF
EEF

Susie Fraser is Director of Manchester Communication Research School, English teacher at Manchester Communication Academy and Programme Lead for Designing Effective Professional Development with EEF.

Blog •3 minutes •

For school leaders with responsibility for professional development, the start of the new academic year can feel like your moment to shine. The first days back are full of optimism, energy and the opportunity to share the most promising new teaching and learning ideas, along with exciting new research.

Such training days are also frantic and can be content heavy. They can prove too much for the cognitive load of teachers who are preparing to meet new classes and deliver new lessons. Soon they’re over and we breathe a sigh of relief and normal school life begins.

Maybe now, this is a nostalgic anecdote of times gone by. As we become more informed by the evidence around professional development, maybe our plans take a less front-loaded approach. We know that effective professional development can have an impact on the quality of teaching and learning, and this is one of our best bets for improving outcomes for pupils.

As we become more informed by the best bets’ for professional development, maybe our plans can be less frantic and more focused.

Focused on the mechanisms for effective professional development


The Effective Professional Development Guidance Report from the EEF identifies 14 mechanisms that should be considered when designing professional development.

Mechanisms

What struck me most about these mechanisms is that many of them would be present outside of an initial whole staff session. These follow up activities – such as monitoring’, positive reinforcement’, context specific repetition’, prompts and cues’ – are more likely to occur when strategies are being put into practice, rather than during an overloaded training day.

We also know that this concept of follow up activities, such as monitoring and adaptation, align with the principles of effective implementation.

Furthermore, we know from the EEF Guidance Report on Putting Evidence to Work is that implementation teams are an important component of any sustainable change.

With that in mind, there are three themes we can consider when planning for effective professional development:

1. Identify your implementation team


For us, that is a group of Teacher Educators who support the implementation of new teacher techniques within their subject areas. They work with colleagues in setting goals (mechanism 3), prompting action planning (mechanism 12) and monitoring and providing feedback (mechanism 9).

2. Align whole school priorities with professional development


If there is a rhythm to quality assurance activities that explicitly monitor the implementation of prioritised teaching and learning strategies, there is a greater opportunity to assess the fidelity of implementation. This allows for more responsive revisiting of prior knowledge (mechanism 2).

3. Aim for a balance of mechanisms


One of the key messages of the Effective Professional Development guidance report is that our best bet is to ensure a balanced design’. That is to say, rather than striving to achieve all 14 mechanisms in a programme, the likelihood of changing practice increases if the programme includes mechanisms from across all four categories (it may be five or six mechanisms in total).

Ensuring a balanced PD design page 0001

In order to achieve this balanced design’, we can consider the developmental activities that take place outside of the traditional notion of a training session.

Only when these three themes things are intentionally planned considered and designed, do we have our best chance of new habits sticking for the long term.

We may always enjoy the optimism fuelled first training day of the year, but the evidence on professional development suggests that the mechanisms’ that occur after are what matters most to sustained success.